Poetry Magazines - The best collection of poetry magazines online - Simon Armitage

Every year, on the morning of my birthday, I receive a package from my uncle. It's usually a smallish box wrapped up with plain paper and string (regardless of whether the string is needed or not). There is also a tag attached that says 'Dear Sami... Love Uncle P'. Inside the box there is always a jar of pickles, around which another tag is tied; the message written on this tag is always 'Surprise!'. This has happened for eighteen years.

                                               *

The pickle ritual started when I was six.

The family had just come back from my grand aunt's funeral and we
were all gathered quietly in the garden. My uncle sat alone under the old oak. He decided it would be the right thing if I sat on his knee and talked to him. He hadn't seen me since my birth.

So I stayed with him, and he balanced me with his right hand whilst he held his glass with his left. He asked me if I'd been scared at the funeral, but I said no. He said that I was very brave. He said that I was very brave, and that he was a coward. Then he asked me how I wanted to be buried. I said I didn't want to be buried, I wanted to be pickled and put in a jar. When he heard this, he laughed very hard and made a joke about being a pickle. He kept laughing until everyone was looking at him and there were tears in his eyes.

After that, I received the first jar on my seventh birthday.

                                               *

I was told that my uncle moved around a lot, that he worked in various professions. As a child I always imagined him as a war correspondent crouching behind the front lines. I could see him concentrating on writing his messages to me whilst bombs went off all around him.

His handwriting still is very careful.

                                                *

The jars reflected his travels. He seemed to send me the strangest, mostexotic ones he could find. 1 received jars from India, Mexico, Kenya, Peru and beyond. And they were always filled with different varieties of pickle - gherkins, peppers, cucumbers, lemons, carrots and so on. I don't know what he meant in this.

                                                *

For my eighteenth birthday, I received a pickled squid.

                                                *

I'd keep the jars hidden for weeks until my mother found them and threw them out. My wife does the same thing now. I told my uncle about this when I saw him once at another family funeral. He mumbled something about women and pretended to shiver.

                                                *

My uncle is an old man. I last saw him after the death of a family friend. He looked tired and shaken. He could barely hold his glass. I told him I was Sami and shook his hand. It felt like paper. 1 could see the tendons stretching out underneath his wrists. 1 thought of the string he wrapped my parcels with.

                                                 *

I have only seen him five times in my life - five times that I can remember. On the last occasion, we talked briefly and he told me how important family was to him. He told me how it had helped him so much that I'd been there, eighteen years ago, after the death of his mother. He said how good it was now that I'd grown and we could talk together as men. I excused myself early, and said I had to pick up my daughter from school.

                                                 *

My uncle has no children.

                                                 *

I kept the labels. All of them. They are hidden. I tied them up with a rubber band and put them in a box in the attic. I take them out sometimes, when my wife isn't at home. She doesn't like it that I have them. She's heard about my uncle.

                                                 *

The twelfth label was for the squid jar. It is surprisingly faded for one so recent. I think originally it might have been Japanese, but its nationality has blurred with time. Perhaps my uncle had it for some time before he sent it. Perhaps he found it in a curiosity shop in Tokyo. Perhaps. But I don't like to hypothesise anymore.

                                                 *

I don't imagine what my uncle is doing when he writes the messages now.

                                                 *

There's a strange art to the labels (I imagine there was some to the
pickling as well). I have one from Mexico that is a dazzling Aztec imitation. I can imagine an artist toiling over it like Faberge over his eggs. I don't know whether it was mass-produced.

                                                 *

The squid label is faded, but the illustration still stands out. It shows an old behemoth capsizing a vessel at sea. This seems absurd given that the mollusc in the jar was only the size of a fist. I wasn't even sure whether they could grow to such a size. Maybe my uncle was trying to say something there.

                                                 *

When I was a child, I was disappointed with the more prosaic jars and their labels, but they've grown on me as the years have passed. I like their surety, their neatness. They are all worn by time, but they have a vintage quality to them.

                                                 *

The seventeenth pickle label is from Germany and is almost a parody of Teutonic efficiency. Ingredients, jarring locations, expiry dates - everything is laid out in formal, ordered paragraphs.

                                                 *

I know the time will come when my collection is complete. I hope that I can preserve it somehow. Like the squid label - with its mystery still carrying a faint hint of some true origins.

I do this because I see my uncle. I see him seeing me, seeing all those places through the bottom of his glass. And I see our images of each other divided into those yearly segments And they're not frozen in time, but dissolving. I can feel it. They're fading as the dust gathers around them.